Absolute beginner
Jeremy Clarke
had contact lenses fitted last week. I was Iso blind before, I came out of the opticians feeling like Paul on the Road to Damascus. That evening I went along with ray new eyes to my first evening class of the new autumn term. I was going to do the lip-reading course, but the tutor was knocked over and seriously injured on a pelican crossing the week before and they had to cancel it. Next I put my name down for the certificate in gardening, but the class was withdrawn through lack of interest. Edible fungi was full, so I'm learning the tango. Tango Argentino for Absolute Beginners the class is called.
It's about time I learned to dance. Jiggling about at discos like a hang glider caught on power lines really won't do when you reach your mid-forties. Life's too short. What better, then, than that kind of formal dance where 'Shall we?' is a licence to grab hold of anybody that takes your fancy, clutch them to your bosom and trip the light fantastic. Route one. No mucking about. And if that dance has a worldwide reputation for being as near as possible to sexual intercourse, upright, in tight shoes, to music, so much the better. When I signed up for the tango, that, anyway, was the fantasy.
The reality, as usual, was slightly different. For a start, every one of the 26 absolute beginners standing in a circle on the floor of the freezing assembly hall was physically unattractive. Over half were strikingly so. It was like walking into Madame Tussaud's. We took it in turns to introduce ourselves and to describe in a word or two how we were feeling. By and large the ladies were 'afraid' and the men were 'excited'. I said I was 'jubilant' but the teacher didn't invite me to elaborate.
First, we practised walking around the room, first forwards, then backwards. Then the teacher told us to find a partner and grasp each other by the elbows. She put a CD in the player, waved her remote control at it and away we went, in an anticlockwise direction. The basic, absolute beginners' step was this: the chaps slink forward, gimlet-eyed, and the ladies slink backwards with their eyes closed, trusting that the chaps will steer them away from walls, tables, stray dogs and other revolving couples. The chap is in charge; the lady's job is to sense his movements and acquiesce with them.
My first partner, who looked like she'd stepped straight out of a Hogarth print, absolutely refused to let herself be guided. She pulled me around the room looking anxiously over her shoulder as if she was reversing the car. When the music finally stopped, the teacher clapped her hands and we had to change partners.
There might well have been a historical period in which my next dancing partner would have been acclaimed a great beauty, but, if there was, I'd say it was no later than Palaeolithic times. This one closed her eyes and allowed me to steer, but stepped backwards so slowly and with such trepidation it was like dancing with a three-toed sloth.
After the basic tango step, we learned the embrace. Our teacher hadn't started off with the initial embrace, as would have been logical, she said, because she was sensitive to the fact that the British don't like to touch. A survey measuring the 'personal space' required by the various nationalities, for example, she said, found that while the Italians liked a radius of two centimetres, the British ideal was a good ten yards. But if we were to learn the tango properly it must be faced that sooner or later we were going to have to dance in an embrace rather than holding one another by the elbow tips.
She made no bones about it. The closeness of our embrace, she said, should be determined by the extent and unanimity of the sexual attraction. If there is disagreement, a compromise should be reached. With her co-teacher, a sleazy-looking Dutchman called Hans, she demonstrated the embrace for us, exaggerating with comic effect first intense sexual attraction, then repugnance. Then she clapped her hands and told us to find a new partner and dance this time in the proper tango embrace.
The music she chose this time was a violin solo so plangent it made you want to go and live in a gypsy caravan and have stiletto fights over women in mantillas. My new partner, a dead ringer for the late Chairman Mao, hung on to me like a shipwrecked seaman clinging to the wreckage. But I tell you what: once we had closed our eyes and abandoned ourselves to the music, the unconscious simultaneity of movement we achieved was really quite something. Next week, we are learning how to take a step to the side.
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